Technology

I'd say what he actually did was deflect the question and refuse to acknowledge that it was about appearance at all. He just talked about function over form, and that it works well and is intuitive.

I actually agree with that, I like the big buttons, and context menus usually have whatever I'm looking for, but you can take the deflection as an admission he knows it's ugly and doesn't think it's even important enough to directly address.

I mean honestly just a beauty pass that softened the colour palette and gave it a less harsh appearance overall would make a big difference. He could even just create a skinning system, that's one way that this has been addressed in the past, and it's a job an engineer should be able to do just fine.